Open stands for ...
Imagine higher education more accessible and sustainable across disciplines and throughout the research life cycle.
Within open scholarship, open science, or open education, active participants in these umbrella movements can accelerate discovery and collaboration while increasing societal and scholarly impact. Across disciplines, researchers (professors, postdoctoral fellows, librarians), students (graduate and undergraduate), educators and other practitioners can all gain from choosing open. Specifically, open-access publishing, open-source software, open-data practices, open repositories, and open educational resources (OER) offer clear strategies and approaches used in various capacities across disciplines. While more established in STEM and social science fields, open practices can grow to address discipline and field-specificities.
Benefits
Research quality and real-world impact can be harnessed by choosing “open.” For example, an OA article in health research or psychology may help clinicians alongside patients, an open data set may help downstream researchers to replicate and validate a study or incentivize future research collaborations, a first-year calculus open textbook may save students hundreds of dollars, and a specialized OER in aerospace or art history may help the professor adjust their materials from year to year.
Researchers benefit. Studies on OA impact show that OA articles receive significantly more citations and reach a broader global audience compared to those behind paywalls (Breugelmans et al., 2018; Hook et al., 2019; Noori, 2024; Piwowar et al., 2018).
Students benefit. Based on student enrollment capacity for courses that adopted open textbooks released by Concordia University Library in 2025-2026, students would have saved up to 262,7250$. In addition to financial savings, open textbooks improve accessibility and instructional flexibility. These real-world examples demonstrate how open scholarship translates aspirations into measurable benefits for both individuals and broader communities.
How to get started
To get started, develop a knowledge mobilization plan. "Knowledge mobilization is an umbrella term encompassing a wide range of activities relating to the production and use of research results, including knowledge synthesis, dissemination, transfer, exchange, and co-creation or co-production by researchers and knowledge users (Source: SSHRC Guidelines for Effective Knowledge Mobilization)." Open access publications are one of several tools to consider in an effective plan that centralizes your research users and that considers impact and outcomes.
Consider OA publishing by sharing your preprints or postprints through open repositories like Spectrum, making your data sets available for reuse, adopting an open-source platform or creating an open educational resource. These steps can empower you to begin contributing to the open scholarship movement right away while aligning yourselves with funding agency requirements (i.e., FRQ and Tri-Agency), the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) (signed by Concordia), the Open Science Working Group at Concordia, and Concordia’s two senate resolutions on Open.
Whether by making research articles or datasets open or by using or creating OER, individuals are encouraged to choose the right approaches for their knowledge mobilization strategies, disciplinary practices, skills, academic career and learning trajectories. Choose open for its potential for pro-social impact, collaboration, discovery, and alignment with the higher ideals of university life, including the democratization of higher education.
Library support
Are you feeling uncertain about how to publish OA, granting-agency OA policies, or alternatives to expensive article processing charges or more?
- Resources in our Open at Concordia guide includes a page on the FRQ OA Policy and the Tri-Agency OA Policy, Where to publish OA?, Institutional memberships and discounts for Concordia Authors. See also our related librarian guides, including our Copyright Guide.
- Your subject librarian can help.
- In addition to subject-librarian workshops in your department we cluster open-access workshops in October and open-education workshops in March.
Imagine higher education more accessible and sustainable across disciplines and throughout the research life cycle.
Approaches Include:
Open Educational Resources (OER) include open teaching materials, textbooks, and renewable assignments. Learn more about OER at Concordia.
Open access (OA) publishing includes OA journals, articles, and books. There are several OA pathways, including the diamond, gold, and green road.
Open source includes software and hardware where the code has been made open for sharing and adaptation. The Technology Sandbox at Concordia works with open source tools and software. There is a range of open and closed source technology available to library users.
Open data includes numerical datasets, often used in the sciences and social sciences, and primary source datasets, often used in the humanities and fine arts. Learn more about finding open data.
Imagine how data might be visualized. Occupancy by Francisco Berrizbeitia uses Concordia's machine-readable open data to visualize the number of people in the Library (see documentation for more examples). Learn more about data analysis and visualization.
Learn more about sharing your data with Research Data Management. A data management plan helps provide the rationale and process for making research data openly available or closed.
Open Repositories include discipline-specific repositories, our institutional repository, Spectrum, and data repositories. They are a way of making parts of the research cycle (i.e., data, submitted manuscripts, and accepted manuscripts) openly available.